When to Integrate Additional Payment Providers to Your Website

There is a common belief that processing volume is the sole factor determining the future of all aspects of business operations. The logic seems rational: if you accept a solid number of payments, you need many payment system providers. However, in practice, this approach often faces challenges and real-world operational conditions that don’t justify it.

Today, we’ll discuss what to focus on when building a payment infrastructure for your online business and how to avoid mistakes. Whether you handle this yourself or seek our help, this approach is equally relevant in both cases.

The key factors to consider in this process (though not limited to them) include:

Markets of Operation

First and foremost, to decide on the number of payment providers for your business, you need to consider the markets where your company operates or plans to operate. Each market often has its own payment-specific characteristics and distinctive features.

For example, the U.S. market, which is highly popular for digital goods, comes with specific challenges related to credit card acquiring and audience characteristics. On the other hand, Latin America, which is in high demand today, has completely different qualities and payment methods. Therefore, to operate successfully in both markets, you’ll need to integrate payment methods relevant to each one separately.

This isn’t always achievable through a single payment system, which immediately creates the need for diversification. When operating in two such different markets, you simply can’t do without different providers tailored to each. Otherwise, the coverage may be poor and won’t yield the expected results. And this isn’t even about payment volumes yet. Even if they are relatively small, to grow them, you’ll still need more than one payment system.

At the same time, when operating in a single market, it’s important to have a backup payment gateway, which you can also use as leverage in negotiation with your primary provider. You should also consider the market situation in your main target country: if payment solutions are often unstable, having several PSP options is a must.

Your Product and Industry

Much in payment processing depends on the industry you operate. Often, the higher the business margin, the higher the risk it is considered to carry. Of course, margin isn’t the only factor influencing this categorization (otherwise, bottled water in airports would be considered ultra-high-risk), but it is naturally taken into account. Typically, high-risk segments include digital services and entertainment related to gambling, dating, 18+ services, subscriptions, cryptocurrencies, and similar areas.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), payment providers that work equally well across all industries and understand their nuances are rare. This is especially true for high-risk business segments or high-demand digital products. While an online clothing store can easily connect Stripe or Adyen (though you need to know how to work with them), many other projects are unable to do so due to compliance restrictions and transaction volumes. Therefore, it’s necessary to focus on a different segment of payment systems that offer “turnkey” services and are more oriented toward specific merchant categories.

Additionally, high-risk industries are often associated with regulatory shifts and market “storms,” which can temporarily disrupt payment providers' operations. For example, they may need to urgently revise their business processes to meet new regulatory requirements, or a channel that worked yesterday may become unavailable today. This creates a need for such businesses to have more backup options than are necessary for physical goods with delivery.

Audience: Portrait of Your Customer

While markets and business types form the foundation, many often forget about customers. Yet this is one of the most important factors influencing a merchant’s position in payment networks, the number of required providers, and payment volumes. Chargeback levels, fraudulent transactions, and disputes are shaped precisely by the audience a website serves. This, in turn, directly affects the merchant’s good standing, the fees applied, and potential penalties.

Having multiple providers in this context allows for better balancing within acceptable fraud levels, diversifying risks, and collaborating with PSPs that have better practices in this area.

Some merchants might think that chargeback issues concern everyone but not them, since their customers won’t dispute payments because their audience is high-quality. However, the acceptable dispute rate today is less than 1% of successful transactions, which isn’t as high as it might seem. For small merchants, this is literally a couple of dozen payments that can significantly impact a positive profile built over years. Losing vigilance even once can have consequences. That’s why, when relying on card payments, it’s important to choose several acquirers with high fraud protection and a risk appetite that suits you.

Financial Capabilities and Business Stage

We must not forget the most fundamental factor that comes first in any business decision: cost-effectiveness and the cost of implementation. In the early stages, many startups plan everything at once: complex routing, cascading, connecting third-party orchestrators, a dozen providers, and another dozen backups.

At the same time, many assess the cost of connection fees but often forget about the cost of implementing all these tools into their own business. Integrating each payment system requires hours of work from development, testing, and product teams. These specialists could be doing something else while adapting a new payment system to the website. Here, it’s important to ask yourself: Are these costs rational? Building an in-house routing system isn’t free — if you’re not paying fees to an external provider, it’s the cost of in-house development.

It’s important to calculate this cost from the very beginning and, together with the factors mentioned above, make a balanced decision about how many payment systems your business truly needs. After all, the main task of a payment structure is to ensure high-quality payment acceptance at a reasonable cost with the ability to scale. Can your payment system do that?

To find out, you can order a payment audit from us — a comprehensive analysis that will show you where to go and how to optimize your payment operations to earn, not lose, money on fees and oversights.